Ooh, ooh! I love wishlists! Even though I haven't had much of a chance to use Anim8or much recently .

OBJECT MODE:Chamfer/Fillet - it's a pain to "harden" edges for subdivided models. Sometimes, it's nigh impossible. If Anim8or could do this automatically, it'd be incredible. (If you don't know what this is, Steve, let me know)

Cut Surface - sort of like the Knife tool, but adaptable to follow the contours of the existing surface rather than just making cuts in the plane (poorly explained again - sorry)

Natural Merge Points - for a mirrored object, sometimes it's a pain to find a distance that all points will be merged at. At other times, it's impossible to do them all at once because some areas have really high point density, while others don't. It'd be so much nicer if Anim8or were able to recognize analogous points, and 99.99% of the time, it'd be exactly what the user wanted anyway.

Natural Bridge - along the same vein, but with bridging of objects. I believe Wings3d has such a feature.

FIGURE MODE:Insert Bone - for those times when you realize it would be so much more convenient to have a bone in a given location...

Painted Weights - as much as I love this tool, it's really hard to use because the brush paints everything behind it, thus requiring multiple revisions of a single area.

SEQUENCE MODE:IK - I know it's in the works, but just saying .

Range of Motion Alteration - currently, the values can be changed, but the mode must be changed afterwards for them to be used. If this could all occur in Sequence mode, it'd be nicer.

Not a bad start . A couple of things I'd recommend doing are making the eye sockets larger and possibly separating the lower jaw. The skull is actually composed of 28 (or 29, depending on who you ask) individual bones, but the mandible (lower jaw) is one that's noticeably separated from the others.

Woohoo! I've been waiting for this one for a long, long time . Special thanks to NickE et al. for making this dream a reality!

I am having a little trouble making it work, though. I have the chainmaker a8s file in my scripts directory. I tried renaming a spline that I created "chainpath," then clicked the Chain Path button on the left, then clicked back in the modeling window. Nothing happened. What am I doing wrong? Any help would be much appreciated - and I can show you the old warrior the way he was meant to be .

Hello hello! Some of you may remember my old models and desire to make some chains. Thanks to Steve's latest script, I've tweaked an old model to better fit my original concept artwork and my vision. Here's the original:

I don't really remember how long it took me to do those old chains with the interlocking links, which were copied, rotated, and pasted individually by hand. I'm sure it was on the order of hours. And now, thanks to the new spline script, within an hour I give you:

The original concept had a lot more chains, but it didn't have the skulls, so I had to cut out two of the large loop chains that I had planned on to accommodate his war trophies. As you can see, the script creates a structure along a designated spline, but it still doesn't look much like a chain. However, with the new spline tools that Steve has offered in the ASL, I hope someone will be able to create a script that will take a set of links and then concatenate them along a given spline, like so:

Hello all - I'm sorry to have been away for so long. I haven't really had a chance to work on the skeleton as much as I'd like, unfortunately, with work and life getting in the way. At present, I have another major job going on and for it I'm modeling a heart (once I get to an advanced enough stage, I'll post some renders of that). Hope to work on this project again sometime real soon. Thanks for all your support!

Looking very nice so far, but right now, his tentacles sort of come off his body separate from one another. Real octopi have a sort of webbing connecting them. Right now, your topology is very simplistic, so the easiest way to do this would be to delete the face in between the extruded tentacles and merge the edges. There are more complex methods, but that'd be the simplest, and given the current mesh structure, maybe the best. I like what you've done with the tentacle positions - very expressive and dynamic.

Color me impressed . I really love what you did with the lighting, though I felt the animation was a little stiff. Video works very well with the song, mood, and overall look of the film meshing - however I'd strongly suggest that you attach appropriate precautions for language, etc. since there are a variety of age groups that peruse this website. Other than that, great work - hope to see more .

ENSONIQ5: Thanks. I enjoyed your animation work as well . Inspired me to have a hand at trying animation, but I'm keeping that project a secret for now .

Headwax: Yup, foramen, or foramina for plural . Thanks for the crit. You're absolutely right. I've given it some serious thought since I read your post a few days ago, and it really is sort of easier to model things perfect for now. What I'm thinking about doing is completing the modeling, and then maybe porting it to ZBrush to add the sorts of imperfections you're talking about. Thank you for the thought you put into your reply - it's much appreciated, and even if it seems like I'm not taking your crit, it's definitely been noted .

sciwizeh, flametiger74: Thanks - I'll be reworking the x-ray look as multiple materials since I don't believe it's possible to achieve it accurately with just one. Stay tuned for that one - might be closer to the end of the project than the beginning.

enzo: Thanks. I'll be the first one to say that it's a WIP and definitely not gallery-worthy yet! I'll try and work up a render that Steve can conisder adding. I'd be embarrassed to even propose it at this point, though. What would Steve think? I've got an idea for a render that I will submit in the next month or so, hopefully .

And now, with apologies for the long wait due to my vacation, here are some updates! As I said earlier, I'd be working on the spinal column. It's just about finished, with one last big bone to model and a smaller appendage (the sacrum and the coccyx). Vertebrae feel like the hardest things I've ever modeled. It's way easier to do a head! They're just oddly shaped little buggers and hard to get just right...still, I was extremely insistent on getting all the grooves and such modeled on every single one, so I spent a lot of polies on them:

I don't know how feasible this idea is, but I'm just going to throw it out there and hope that there's a script writer that's talented enough to fulfill it. I'd like a tool where I could draw out a path (not quite like a spline, because I'd like to be able to easily manipulate the points in 3D space, sort of like with the Add Points tool) and then import a chain link object. The script would take my chain link and create a chain from it along the designated path, alternately rotating the links so that they're at 90 degrees to each other. It would make building chains (see below) a lot easier:

Oh the list could go on forever , but one thing I'd really like is low poly proxies. Even pre-subdivision, some models can get out of hand in the number of polies that they are when it comes to animating and using Scene mode. It'd be nice if there could be a lower poly representation of your mesh that you can animate with quickly and easily, and then have the same movements and such applied to the higher poly version.

Lord of Twisties: Thanks. I'm by no means much of an expert on materials. I don't really know what the Glow property is. I mainly increased the diffuse component, added a little specularity, increased the emissive, reduced the roughness slightly, and added a tiny bit on the brilliance. The trans I tried to change to various other settings and see what the end result looks like. If it's too dense, it doesn't give the full X-ray effect, and if it's too light, you just end up losing all the details. I'll try experimenting with it again later on.

hihosilver: Thanks - you're right about the process; see above . Here's a wire:

$imon: This is a new model (scrapped the old skull I was working on years ago), but I did post some images from this in the Original Forum with some ideas for Steve based on some observations I had while modeling the whole thing. Some of the difficulties with the x-ray are inherent to the nature of modeling and construction. The x-ray itself will be brightest where there are areas of high density bone, and darkest where there is a lot of air. So around the nasal passages, you have a lot of sinus spaces and those show up as dark areas in the center of the skull. The thick cranial vault is dense, so that shows up as bright white. With the model, pretty much the reverse is true; it took a ton of polies to model the internal bones of the nasal apparatus, and not that many for the cranial vault. When Trans properties are used, the cranial vault ends up being almost totally transparent and the nasal sinuses end up looking really bright. I don't know if I'll be able to get around it with one uniform material; it might take applying one material to the cranial vault and then another material to the sinuses and so on. Thanks for the input.

Might be a little while before I have the next update...gonna be on vacation .